Clarify documentation on External user seat consumption when used with Guest role

Recently there was a question around external user seat consumption, and the implication of setting that as a Guest user.

I need a sanity check. Question about self-managed external users and whether they consume a license seat in Ultimate if the external user is only given Guest permission. My assumption is that external guest users in Ultimate do not consume a license seat, but we have a call out in the docs that "External users still count towards a license seat." Under the docs for Free Guest users we call out that the self-managed admin can mark the user as "external" to prevent them from creating projects so they don't elevate to Maintainer or Owner and consume a seat and provide a link back to the external user documentation with the aforementioned call out that an external user still counts towards a license seat. I feel like I'm stuck in an infinite loop now.So which is it? Do external users always consume a license seat regardless of the permission role, or are all users with the permission role "Guest" free in Ultimate regardless of the external user mark? Thanks.

An external user generally would utilize a seat unless set for a Guest user in Ultimate (in which case it'd be free). Once we confirm this, a doc update would help answer it better.

External users: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/administration/external_users.html Free user docs: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/subscriptions/self_managed/#free-guest-users